Twentieth century has been a century of violence. Would the 21st century be a century of nonviolence? Nazareth in this paper says yes if the issues of
peace and security are pursued through justice and mutual agreements based on the legitimate aspirations of both sides of the conflict situations.

Introduction

The 20th century has certainly been the most violent and destructive in human history. Over 90 million people have died in the two world Wars, in
the Spanish and Greek civil wars, Hitler’s gas chambers, Arab-Israeli and India-Pakistan wars, and innumerable local conflicts in different parts of the world. Yet, quite possible more people live in constant dread of sudden and violent death today than
at any time in the past. The collapse of the blazing World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001 has seared themselves on the human mind universally. The suicide bomber has become the new symbol of terror
of our times. Even the most sophisticated surveillance systems of a super power have proved in capable of preventing terrorist attacks in broad daylight.
This some what pessimistic reading of history is challenged by one major exception,
Mahatma Gandhi’s application of politics and techniques of
nonviolence in India. Gandhi’s success both redeems human nature
from the inevitability of its historical experience and also
suggests the viability of nonviolence in modern situations.
When Gandhi arrived on the Indian political scene in 1915, the Russian
revolution had just taken place. This and the widespread antipathy
for British rule had generated strong revolutionary fervor among
Indian nationalists. Their father figure was the Bengali novelist
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, whose popular novel, “Anandmath” was the
inspiration for secretes societies, and its hero Satyanand, the
model for “revolutionaries”. It contained the rousing hymn “Bande
Mataram”. Aurobindo Ghosh was the other influential figure. Educated
in England, and selected for the coveted Indian civil service he had
given it up to join the “revolution”. Like many others who had
studied abroad, including Jawaharlal Nehru, he was deeply impressed
by the achievement of Mazzini and Garibaldi and Japan’s defeat by
Russia in 1905. Besides, like the rest of India, he was outraged by
British division of Bengal on religious lines in 1904. Bartaman
Rananiti, ‘Modern Art of War’ published anonymously in 1907
propagated Bankim’s idea that the destruction was another form of
creation and that funds for revolutionary activities must be raised
by any means including terrorism. During the 1905-1915 periods,
there was a spate of assassinations of British officials not only in
India, but also in England.
At the 1919 Amritsar congress session when Gandhi spoke about Truth and
Nonviolence, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a senior nationalist leader who
had connection with and sympathies for the revolutionaries,
contemptuously retorted “My friend, Truth has no place in politics”.
Two decades later another nationalist leader Subhash Chandra Bose,
who assessed the nonviolent approach impractical and ineffectual,
secretly left India for Germany and Japan. In collaboration with the
latter he set up the “Indian National army” with Indian troops taken
as prisoners of war by the Japanese in South East Asia. Gandhi’s
task in promoting Truth and Nonviolence within the Indian national
movement was, therefore, not an easy one. He succeeded only because
of his great moral strength, his total identification with the
poverty-stricken Indian people, and the impressive results his
nonviolent campaigns, based on mass participation, produced vis-a
vis the British, 1920 onwards. Besides Tilak died in 1920 and left a
more open arena for him.
Gandhi ardently believed that truth was an objective moral reality as real and
mighty as God himself. Truth was what constituted the “Right Path”.
For him, there was no greater strength than the strength of the
Human Spirit when it was imbued with Truth and was unafraid to die,
unarmed, upholding it. Since Humans have been created “In the image
of God” and have the “Divine Spark” in them they have to be
motivated and governed by Reason and Love rather than by fear and
violence. When one is steadfastly rooted in Truth, reason will
always lead him along the path of Love and Righteousness. One has to
live, and be ready to die, for Truth, Love and Righteousness but
never to kill. “Given a just cause, capacity for endless suffering,
and avoidance of violence, victory is a certainty”, “Peace will come
when truth is pursued, and Truth implies Justice” and “the end of
nonviolent struggle is always a mutually acceptable agreement, never
the defeat, much less the humiliation of the enemy” are the three
cardinal principles of Gandhi’s trust and Nonviolence strategy.
Within 30 years of Gandhi launching his nonviolent national struggle for Independence,
the British withdrew from India voluntarily and among the first acts
of independent India was to become a member of the British
Commonwealth renamed as Commonwealth of Nations. Britain and India
parted and stayed as friends. The nonviolent struggle for
Independence has been amply justified. Gandhi’s strategy of Truth
and Nonviolence also has had notable successes outside India. Using
this strategy, Martin Luther King managed to bring about more
beneficial change for his fellow blacks in the US in the single
decade of the 1960s, than a bloody civil war and the subsequent
one-hundred years of constitutional and legal struggle had achieved.
It also brought about a fundamental transformation among them.
In the 1960s and 70s, over one hundred European colonies in Asia and Africa achieved
independence. This came about partly because they used the same
efficacious tool of nonviolent struggle, and partly because the
national movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King effectively
changed the global mindset on the acceptability of Imperialism,
Colonialism and Racism. In the 80s and 90s , nonviolent movements
have successfully brought down oppressive regimes in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, Philippines and South Africa. Using the
same technique, one lone, frail woman, Aung san Su Ki has bravely
stood up against oppressive military might in Burma and effectively
swung world public opinion in support of her democratic cause. In
accepting his Nobel prize in December 1989, he spoke thus: “I accept
the prize with profound gratitude on behalf of the oppressed
everywhere, and all those who struggle for freedom and work for
world peace. I accept it as a tribute to the man who founded the
modern tradition of nonviolent action for change Mahatma Gandhi
whose life taught and inspired me. And of course, I accept it on
behalf of the six million Tibetan people, my brave countrymen and
women inside Tibet, who have suffered and continue to suffer so much.
Gandhiji’s nonviolent resistance strategies aroused much interest in the US,
Europe and other parts of the world not only among civil rights and
peace activists and people’s movements the Hungarians used them
after the Soviet Invasion of 1956 but also among military
strategists. Paul Wehr in his articles on ‘Nonviolence and National
Defense’ in the book, “Gandhi in the Post-Modern Age’ writes:
Gandhi‘s ideas on nonviolent national defense made their way to a
western world on the brink of war. Pacifists there were looking
desperately for a viable alternative.” Kenneth Boulding’s essay
“Path of Glory: A New way with War” proposed nonviolent resistance
as a functional substitute for war. He observed that the
technological revolution had made war dysfunctional. This point he
made so many years ago continues to provide the basis for
contemporary social defence research, as does his concept of
transarmament. Boulding appears to have been the first to suggest
that a notion, in this case Great Britain, adopt a nonviolent
defense policy, though others like Lindberg in Denmark, Vrind in
Holland and John Galtung and Arne Naess in Norway were thinking on
the same lines Their work was a direct link between Gandhi and
modern social defense policy. “By the late 1950s in the looming
shadow of the mushroom cloud, social defense seemed more credible as
an option for national defence. By 1962, the concept of ‘social
defense’ had taken root in western Europe The 1964 Oxford Conference
on civilian defense brought together peace researchers, military
strategists and people having direct experience with nonviolent
resistance. By 1980, ‘Social Defense’ or Non-military resistance’
had in one form or the other become an integral pair of overall
defense policy in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.
On the nuclear bomb, Gandhi’s views were clearly articulated by him in the tragic,
aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August
1945: The moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of
the bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter bombs. Unless
the world adopts nonviolence, it will spell certain suicide fro
mankind. Albert Einstein echoed the same sentiments when he started:
“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything but our
thinking; thus we are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond
comparison. We shall require a new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Interestingly, the great theoretician and proponent of nuclear weapons as an instrument
of statecraft, Henry Kissinger began his July 31st, 1979 testimony
to the US Senete Foreign Relations committee on SALT II with the
following words: “In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace’, the philosopher
Immanuel Kant wrote that world peace would come about on one of two
ways: after a cycle of wars of every increasing violence, or by an
act of moral insight in which the nations of the world renounced the
bitter competition bound to lead to self-destruction.”
What was Gandhi’s approach to societal, national global peace? It was based on the
simple assumption that if one really wanted peace, one had to strive
for peace rather than prepare for war. One had to cleanse one’s mind
hatred, arrogance, avarice and fear, and avoid all actions, which
create these emotions in others.
Terrorism is dreadful scourge but it can neither be wished away, nor bombed off
the face of the earth. Much of it today emanates from various brands
of religious fanaticism or religion masked political extremisms,
though at deeper levels historical inequities in land distraction,
living conditions, political, economic and cultural dominance and
military presence are also involved. The 9/11 terrorist attack has
traumatically shown how devastating the consequences of just one
scenario of war, and ushered in the epoch of “asymmetric warfare”
where the enemy is invisible, minuscule in number and strikes not
from outside but from within our societies and nations.
Then crucial issue to be faced by all countries plagued by violence and terrorism is
whether peace and security are better pursued through justice and
negotiated, mutually acceptable agreements based on the aspirations
and legitimate demands of both parties in a conflict situation, or
through massive preemptive or retaliatory military action, and
multibillion dollar national security plans. Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat’s heroic visit to Jerusalem in 1977 and the successful
outcome of his subsequent peace negotiations with Israeli Prime
Minister Izhtak Shamir at Camp David is irrefutable proof that the
nonviolent, negotiated path to peace can and does produce
outstanding, enduring results for both parties in a conflict
situation, even in the most difficult times.

References:

Bultjens, Ralph (1984), ‘Foreword’. Gandhi in the Post Modern Age : issues
in War and Peace by Standford Krolick & Betly Cannon (ed): Colorado School of Mines.

Gandhi, M. K. (1928), ‘The Curse of Assassinations’, Young India

Wehr, Paul (1984), ‘Non-violence and National Defence’ in Gandhi in Post Modern Age.